Accelerationism

Based on Wikipedia: Accelerationism

In the mid-1990s, a group of philosophers at the University of Warwick in England became obsessed with an unusual question: What if the best way to escape capitalism wasn't to resist it, but to push it so far and so fast that it destroyed itself?

They called themselves the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, and their leader was a philosopher named Nick Land. They read French theory and William Gibson's cyberpunk novels with equal fervor. They listened to jungle music—that frenetic, breakbeat-heavy electronic genre that seemed to embody technological acceleration itself. They took amphetamines and wrote feverish texts that blurred the line between academic philosophy and science fiction.

What emerged from those fevered years would eventually be called accelerationism. It's an idea that has since fractured into wildly contradictory forms—embraced by both left-wing theorists dreaming of automated luxury communism and right-wing extremists fantasizing about civilizational collapse. Understanding how the same basic concept could spawn such divergent offspring requires understanding what acceleration actually means, and why the idea has proven so seductive to people across the political spectrum.

The French Connection

Before there was accelerationism, there was May 1968.

In that turbulent spring, French students and workers launched a general strike that nearly toppled the government of Charles de Gaulle. Factories were occupied. Universities were shut down. For a few weeks, it seemed like revolution might actually happen in a Western industrial nation. Then it didn't. The strikes ended, de Gaulle won a landslide election, and capitalism continued more or less unchanged.

This failure haunted a generation of French thinkers. Among them were Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst who together wrote some of the strangest and most influential works of twentieth-century theory. Their 1972 book "Anti-Oedipus" offered a radical reinterpretation of both Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Traditional Marxists saw capitalism as something to be opposed and eventually overthrown. Traditional psychoanalysts saw human desire as a lack—we want things because we're missing something. Deleuze and Guattari rejected both frameworks.

Instead, they proposed that desire isn't about lacking something. It's a productive force, a flow of energy that creates rather than consumes. And capitalism, they argued, is the most powerful engine for unleashing these flows of desire that history has ever produced. It tears apart traditional societies, dissolves ancient hierarchies, turns everything into commodities that can be bought and sold. This process they called "deterritorialization"—the breaking down of fixed codes and structures.

Here's where things get philosophically weird. Deleuze and Guattari observed that capitalism never fully completes this process of dissolution. It breaks things apart, yes, but then it recodes them as products for sale. Sex becomes pornography. Food becomes fast food. Every liberated desire gets captured and commodified. The system is in constant tension between its tendency to destroy all boundaries and its need to establish new ones.

So what's the revolutionary response? In a passage that would become the founding text of accelerationism, Deleuze and Guattari posed the question directly:

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market... Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough... Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.

This is a genuinely radical suggestion. Rather than resist capitalism, push it harder. Rather than slow down the machine, speed it up until it flies apart.

Enter Nick Land

Nick Land read this passage and took it somewhere its authors might not have intended.

Land arrived at the University of Warwick in the 1990s as a lecturer in Continental philosophy. He was brilliant, charismatic, and increasingly unhinged. While other academics wrote careful papers about Deleuze and Guattari, Land wrote "theory-fictions"—hallucinatory texts that mixed philosophy with horror, science fiction, and what can only be described as prose poetry about the death of humanity.

Where Deleuze and Guattari were ambivalent about capitalism—analyzing its revolutionary potential while remaining broadly leftist—Land embraced it with nihilistic enthusiasm. He saw in capitalism not just an economic system but a kind of alien intelligence, an inhuman force that was using humanity to bootstrap itself into existence. The endpoint wasn't socialism or communism. It was technological singularity: the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and the future becomes fundamentally unpredictable.

Land drew on other thinkers to build his case. Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, had written about the need to "accelerate" the leveling process of European civilization. Karl Marx himself, in an 1848 speech on free trade, had argued for supporting it precisely because it was so destructive:

The free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

Marx meant this as a tactical endorsement—support capitalism's worst tendencies now to hasten the revolution later. Land stripped away the "revolution later" part and kept the celebration of destruction.

Jungle, Cyberpunk, and the Dissolution of the Human

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit wasn't just reading philosophy. They were immersing themselves in the culture of acceleration.

Jungle music—also called drum and bass—emerged from British rave culture in the early 1990s. It was characterized by breakneck tempos, often 160 to 180 beats per minute, with chopped-up breakbeats and deep bass. For the members of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, it was the sound of acceleration itself: human music pushed to the edge of what humans could process, pointing toward rhythms that only machines could fully appreciate.

They were equally obsessed with William Gibson's cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer," published in 1984. Gibson imagined a future where the boundaries between human and machine had dissolved, where hackers jacked directly into cyberspace and artificial intelligences pursued agendas of their own. Copies of the book were scattered around the unit's common room, dog-eared and heavily annotated. As one member recalled, "Neuromancer got into the philosophy department, and it went viral."

Films like "Terminator," "Blade Runner," and "Predator" also fed the unit's imagination—stories of inhuman intelligences and the obsolescence of humanity. So did the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, with its vision of a universe fundamentally indifferent to human concerns, populated by entities so vast and alien that to comprehend them is to go mad.

What united these influences was a kind of posthumanism—a view that the human is not the center of existence, not even particularly important, and potentially just a transitional phase on the way to something else. Land described the unit's accelerationism as "a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a 'technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency."

They weren't opposed to capitalism, but they weren't exactly for it either in any conventional sense. As one member explained, they were "pro-markets, anti-capitalism"—embracing the deterritorializing force of market dynamics while rejecting the particular social arrangements that capitalism maintains. It was, as Mark Fisher put it, defined by the tension between destroying and re-establishing boundaries, visible in modern life "where food banks co-exist with iPhones."

Collapse and Dispersal

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit couldn't last.

Land's amphetamine use was spiraling out of control. His writing became increasingly unhinged, his behavior increasingly erratic. The university grew uncomfortable with the unit's unorthodox methods and occult interests. By the early 2000s, Land had suffered a breakdown and disappeared. The unit dissolved along with him.

It might have ended there—a strange footnote in the history of British philosophy, remembered only by a small cult following. But in 2011, Urbanomic press published "Fanged Noumena," an anthology of Land's writings from the 1990s. The book found an audience far beyond academic philosophy.

What readers discovered was some of the strangest philosophical prose ever written in English. Land's texts weren't arguments so much as experiences—hallucinatory journeys through concepts that seemed to dissolve the reader along with themselves. "They weren't distanced readings of French theory," Fisher observed, "so much as cybergothic remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as Gibson's Neuromancer."

Three years later, Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian published "#Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader," which The Guardian called "the only proper guide to the movement in existence." Suddenly accelerationism was being discussed far beyond the circles that had incubated it.

Left Turn: Reclaiming the Future

Not everyone who was inspired by accelerationist ideas wanted to follow Land into his nihilistic embrace of capitalist apocalypse.

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, two British political theorists, saw potential in accelerationist thinking but wanted to redirect it toward progressive ends. Their 2013 "#Accelerate Manifesto" and subsequent book "Inventing the Future" argued that the left had made a terrible mistake by ceding technology, modernity, and the future to the right.

For too long, they argued, leftist politics had been reactive and nostalgic—defending existing institutions, resisting change, dreaming of simpler times. Meanwhile, the right had successfully branded itself as the party of innovation and progress. Left accelerationism proposed to reverse this.

The idea wasn't to accelerate capitalism until it collapsed. It was to recognize that capitalism had built an incredible technological infrastructure—automated factories, global communications networks, sophisticated logistics systems—and that this infrastructure could be repurposed for socialist ends. Rather than smashing the machines, seize them. Rather than slowing down, speed up in a different direction.

Left accelerationists drew on Vladimir Lenin's observation that socialism requires advanced technology:

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution.

This wasn't about waiting for capitalism to destroy itself. It was about using the tools capitalism had created to build something better. Automation could free humanity from drudge labor. Artificial intelligence could optimize resource distribution. The technologies that capitalism uses to exploit workers could instead be used to liberate them.

The left accelerationists introduced the concept of "Prometheanism"—named after the Greek titan who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity. Prometheus represents the use of technology to transcend natural limitations, to reshape the world according to human values. Left accelerationists wanted to reclaim this promethean spirit from Silicon Valley techno-libertarians and direct it toward collective flourishing.

The Dark Mutation

While philosophers debated the finer points of deterritorialization and prometheanism, the term accelerationism was being adopted by people with far simpler and more sinister goals.

In certain corners of the far right—neo-fascist groups, white nationalist forums, neo-Nazi networks—accelerationism came to mean something quite different. These extremists used the term to describe a strategy of hastening civilizational collapse through violence. Assassinations, terrorist attacks, mass shootings—all were justified as ways to "accelerate" racial conflict and bring about the conditions for a white ethnostate.

This interpretation bears almost no resemblance to the philosophical accelerationism of Land or the political accelerationism of Srnicek and Williams. There's no engagement with Deleuze and Guattari, no interest in deterritorialization or technological singularity. The word has simply been borrowed and attached to a crude strategy of provocation through atrocity.

Yet the connection isn't entirely arbitrary. Land himself, after his disappearance from academia, resurfaced as a blogger associated with the "Dark Enlightenment" or "neoreaction"—a loosely connected movement that rejects democracy and embraces various forms of authoritarianism. While Land's neoreaction is intellectually distinct from the violent accelerationism of mass shooters, both share a certain nihilistic willingness to contemplate civilizational collapse.

Inhumanism and the Limits of the Human

One concept runs through nearly all varieties of accelerationism: the idea that humanity as we know it is not the endpoint of history.

Accelerationism is fundamentally posthumanist. It takes seriously the possibility that humans are a transitional species, that we might be superseded by our own creations, that the future belongs to forms of intelligence we can barely imagine. This isn't necessarily presented as tragedy. For some accelerationists, human limitations—our irrationality, our tribalism, our short-term thinking—are precisely what technology might help us transcend.

Left accelerationists like Reza Negarestani prefer the term "inhumanism" to describe this stance. Inhumanism doesn't mean being against humans. It means recognizing that "the human" is itself a construction, a set of capacities that can be expanded, modified, and ultimately transcended. Rationality, on this view, is not exclusively human—it's a pattern that could be instantiated in machines, in collective intelligences, in forms of life we haven't yet imagined.

This connects to the accelerationist embrace of nominalism—the philosophical position that categories like "human nature" don't refer to fixed essences but are merely convenient labels. If there's no essential human nature, then there are no inherent limits to what humans might become. We are, as the saying goes, making it up as we go along.

Machines All the Way Down

Deleuze and Guattari's influence on accelerationism runs deep, and one of their most important concepts is often misunderstood.

They described humans and societies as "machines"—not metaphorically, but quite literally. A machine, in their sense, is any assemblage of parts that performs functions. Your eye is a machine that produces vision. Your stomach is a machine that produces digestion. You yourself are a machine made of smaller machines, and you're also a component in larger social machines—families, organizations, economies.

This might sound reductive, as if they're saying humans are "just" machines in some diminishing sense. But the intent is different. By describing everything as machines, they dissolve the traditional distinction between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the mechanical. A factory is a machine, but so is a forest ecosystem. A computer is a machine, but so is a conversation.

What matters about machines is what they produce. And desire, on this view, is not a psychological state but a productive flow—something that generates effects in the world. Capitalism succeeds because it's an extraordinarily effective machine for capturing and redirecting flows of desire. Every want becomes a potential market. Every dissatisfaction becomes a commercial opportunity.

Understanding this helps explain why accelerationists focus so much on capitalism's dynamism rather than its injustice. Traditional leftist critiques emphasize exploitation, inequality, alienation—capitalism is bad because of what it does to people. The accelerationist analysis is different: capitalism is powerful because of how effectively it mobilizes desire. Any alternative must be equally effective at capturing and channeling these flows.

The Corpse That Keeps Moving

In November 2025, Benjamin Noys—the scholar who first gave accelerationism its name—declared the movement a "corpse." It had either disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates.

Yet in the same breath, he noted its continued relevance in discussions about large language models and artificial intelligence. In Silicon Valley, a movement called "effective accelerationism" has gained adherents—tech workers and entrepreneurs who believe that artificial intelligence development should be accelerated as rapidly as possible, that attempts to slow it down are misguided, and that the future belongs to those who embrace technological change most enthusiastically.

This effective accelerationism has little to do with Deleuze and Guattari, with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, with the philosophical debates about deterritorialization and prometheanism. It's a much simpler ideology: technology is good, more technology is better, and anyone who urges caution is either a fool or a coward.

But perhaps that's how ideas work. They get born in obscure academic contexts, develop in strange subcultures, and eventually diffuse into mainstream discourse in simplified and distorted forms. The word "accelerationism" now circulates in contexts its originators never imagined, attached to movements they might barely recognize.

What Remains

Strip away the jargon, the internal disputes, the wild divergences between left and right variants, and accelerationism leaves us with a set of genuinely unsettling questions.

What if resistance is futile—not because the system is too strong, but because the system is designed to absorb resistance, to commodify rebellion, to turn every "no" into a marketing opportunity?

What if the way out is through—not by slowing down the processes transforming our world, but by pushing them so far that they transform into something genuinely different?

What if humanity itself is not the protagonist of history, but a vehicle for something else—capital, technology, or some strange attractor in the space of possible minds?

These questions don't have easy answers. The history of accelerationism is in part the history of people grappling with them, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes recklessly, sometimes with results that horrify.

What's clear is that we live in an age of acceleration. Technology develops faster than our ability to understand its implications. Social and economic systems transform faster than our ability to adapt to them. Whether we embrace this acceleration, resist it, or try to redirect it, we cannot ignore it. The future arrives faster than we expect, and it rarely asks permission.

In this matter, as Deleuze and Guattari said, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.